Zoe Strauss Meets Strangers

For Zoe Strauss, a camera isn’t just for making pictures—it’s a tool for engaging with people, in her South Philly neighborhood and around the country. Her book “America,” a personal and idiosyncratic chronicle of the Bush era, has a paradox at its heart. Individually, her landscapes are bleak, her subjects troubled. But through the alchemy of Strauss’s big-hearted enthusiasm for meeting people and taking photos, the book as a whole feels somehow joyful.

“The ability to connect with others is most often irrelevant to location,” she writes. “If a lesbian anarchist can drive into the desert, knock on a stranger’s door, and go into a trailer where there’s a bunch of guns, and leave with kisses, a promise to return, and a cup of Sanka to go, all’s right in the world at that moment.”

Here’s a selection from “America.”

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